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EPA announcement

Obama: What you didn't know

Podesta’s a runner, and he couldn’t look more like one. But he’s not used to meetings on the move—even if this one was to discuss the progress on climate change, the issue he’s been trying to get more attention to for years and came back to the White House in January to lead.

The EPA’s proposed carbon emissions standards rule released Monday is one of the most significant actions the federal government’s ever taken on climate change. If finalized next year and put in place, it would be one of Obama’s largest legacy achievements.

Making sure that it didn’t seem like a big deal or all about Obama was all part of Podesta’s plan.

Interviews with Podesta and other senior White House aides on Monday portrayed a White House that had been closely involved along every step of the way, from drafting the rule to the roll-out and messaging effort surrounding it.

Lap after lap that evening in mid-May, Podesta and McDonough talked the president through the proposed rule. He wanted to know how it squared with promises he had made in Copenhagen in 2009, would hold up against the inevitable court challenges and how they’d attempted to balance the concerns of business, labor, Democrats and green groups so that everyone walked away not too disappointed and excited enough.

Last week in the Oval Office, Obama signed off on the outreach and messaging strategy Podesta and climate adviser Dan Utech briefed him on. The president wanted all the groups they needed bought in. He wanted the White House to be ready with whatever rebuttals they’d need. And most of all, he wanted to minimize the prospects of this becoming yet another flashpoint.

“He wanted to know,” Podesta said Monday evening, relaxed after a successfully calm roll-out day, “‘Okay, how are we prepared for battle here?’”

Obama had all day Monday for an event at the White House, or maybe in front of a power plant, running footage for the evening news of him announcing his plan to save the planet. Just last week, he’d talked to the graduating cadets at West Point about the likelihood that they’d have food riot duty in their futures. Instead, they had EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy make the announcement, keeping Obama to a conference call run by the American Lung Association.

“The idea was to modulate his involvement,” said an administration official.

For seven minutes, Obama held forth on children’s asthma, which White House data showed was the most compelling angle they had — pointing out the disparate rates in the African-American and Latino community — with only a passing reference to taking care of “this beautiful blue ball in the middle of space,” just before he put down the phone.

For months, Podesta ran a strategy to seed support for the rule, planning a sequence of events to get people thinking about the administration’s efforts on climate change — a visit to the California wildfire damage in February, a solar summit at the White House in April, the National Climate Assessment in May (complete with an afternoon of interviews by weathermen in the Rose Garden).

The effort, Podesta said, was “try to tell a story to the American people so these individual actions didn’t come in a way that they didn’t understand what the overall strategy was.”

By the time Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012, the Obama campaign was certain he was going to win. But looking out at the damage to the Jersey Shore from his helicopter, he talked, aides said, about how the area would need to rebuild in a totally different way — with climate change in mind.

The change that really mattered, though, was the amount of coverage the storm was getting — hitting the media capital helped — and the way the White House felt it resonating with people around the country. They don’t like to use the word opportunity to describe where they found themselves after Sandy, but that’s what this was.

“It was something he always knew he was going to come back to,” said White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “But Sandy also put the connection between climate and weather and the impact it could have on the radar for Americans in a level to which prior to that it had not broken.”

Climate change hadn’t gone well for the White House in the first term — the House barely passed a cap-and-trade bill in 2009 that died in the Senate — but became yet another campaign issue that helped Republicans take the House and pick up Senate seats in the 2010 midterms.